People walking along an open sewer in an unidentified African town (John Wollworth/Shutterstock.com).

On the Originalism blog, Michael Ramsey and Andrew Hyman responded to my post for Law and Liberty on the original understanding of substantive due process. Hyman disputes the definition of “liberty” I provided and asserts a different definition of “due process of law” in the Fifth Amendment, while Ramsey asks for more evidence that the definition of “liberty” given wasn’t unique to Thomas Jefferson.

People walking along an open sewer in an unidentified African town (John Wollworth/Shutterstock.com).

The octocentennial of Magna Carta has presented an auspicious occasion for reflecting on exactly what we ought to be celebrating, if anything, about Magna Carta, an ancient document with a tenuous connection to our own time and place. Is Magna Carta the fountainhead of our most cherished rights and liberties? Or is it a document entirely of its own time—an unremarkable set of compromises between King John and a few of his rapacious barons—with next to nothing to say to us today?
In this post, I’ll describe the responses of Professor Martin Krygier, one of the more penetrating writers on the…

People walking along an open sewer in an unidentified African town (John Wollworth/Shutterstock.com).

I previously suggested that a traditionalist judicial decision is self-consciously so. It demonstrates a keen interest in the coherence and continuity of particular legal practices and authorities over long periods of time. It is intentional about retransmitting and re-cementing those enduring legal practices and authorities in its own decision. And its traditionalism emerges from a close reading of the opinion and from attending to the court’s understanding of its own role.

Harvard Law School’s dynamic AdLaw duo (Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule) has struck again. In The New Coke: On the Plural Aims of Administrative Law the authors take aim at the insurgent
fundamental assault on the legitimacy of the administrative state, under the banner of “the separation of powers.” The challenge is playing a growing role in separate [Supreme Court] opinions, and on occasion, it finds its way into majority opinions as well. Justice Clarence Thomas is the principal advocate, but he has been joined, on prominent occasions, by Justice Antonin Scalia and sometimes by Justices Samuel Alito and Chief…

On March 4, 1629, John Selden, the most learned man in England, was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He had been arrested on charges of conspiracy and sedition against King Charles I. The question is: what did Selden choose to read while imprisoned?

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